(The following piece is a look at a project that Keith Smith and I are working on at the present. We will release more and more of the details as we head toward the finish line.)

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 (KJV)

God created us tripartite: body, soul and spirit. The body is the physical part; the spirit is the life activity; and the soul is the part that makes each of us unique. Think of it as an iPod: it consists of the device itself, the electrical current, and the media recorded on it. These three aspects of each person are inseparable until our final day on earth. You are a creation of God and all things related to your physical being have a huge impact on your spiritual being. Therefore, the care of the body bears a vital relationship to spirituality.

The Bible makes it clear that the soul and the spirit have an eternal essence, whereas the body is only for this life. This does not diminish the importance of the body; if anything, it emphasizes our obligation to maintain it as the repository of the soul and spirit. As Paul, the Apostle wrote to the Corinthians, “If you only look at us, you might well miss the brightness. We carry this precious Message around in the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives. That’s to prevent anyone from confusing God’s incomparable power with us.” 2 Corinthians 4:7 (MSG). So, even though our bodies are perishable, they are still God’s chosen method to house His Spirit and to interact with other human beings on earth.

If you have failed to maintain the body that God gave you, you must return to an alignment with the purpose of your Creator. You are commissioned by God to treat your body with the highest level of respect. The Old Testament proclaimed the health and well-being of each person as a fundamental part of the Jewish religion. Personal hygiene guidelines, dietary laws, disease prevention laws and dozens of related customs were imposed upon the people in an effort to keep them healthy. The New Testament views many of these laws as spiritual applications, but the principle of maintaining a healthy body stays the same.

Unfortunately, far too many people have neglected their physical bodies. The kinds of abuse to which mankind has subjected the body boggles the mind. God never intended for us to become obese, drug addicts, alcoholics, smokers, consumers of poisonous junk food or mutilators of our physical beings. Proper understanding of the scriptures will turn this around and create new, healthier habits. If these demands seem extreme, they only show how far you may have drifted off of God’s chosen course.

The purpose in getting you on track with your body goes beyond health, feeling better, looking good or living longer. Those may be worthwhile objectives, but the real purpose is that this is what God wants! Keep God’s will as the driving force behind your exercises. It is your spiritual response to the divine purpose.

Reader Comments (3)

A man, created in the image and likeness of his Creator is a 3-in-1 being. He is a soul that has a spirit, living in a body; just as his Creatoris also a Trinity.The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. For a man to come into the full awareness of his purpose, he needs to understand that these three individual beings of which he is composed, are supposed to function at the same rate, in full capacity, with intimate dependency, and perfect sync with one-another, as expected by his Creator. And Jesus increased in wisdom (intelligence of the Soul) and stature (Body physique), and in favor (advancement in the Spirit) with God and men...

Man does not meet the definition of a trinity, as I understand it. I am not three separate persons with three distinct personalities. I am one in person, one in essence, one in legal entity. The distinction between the Father and the Son was in reference to Spirit and flesh. Jesus prayed as a man; as God, he answered prayer. He ate as a man; as God, he fed the five thousand. The lesser always prays to the greater, e.g. the flesh prayed to the Spirit. If the Son and the Father were co-equal, there would be no need for one to pray to the other. John 1:1; 1:14, Colossians 2:9-10; 1 Timothy 3:16.

When you say, "Jesus prayed as a man", do you mean his human spirit, or his flesh body? Or do we also, as men, have our flesh body pray to God, who is Spirit? Does it mean anything at all to say a flesh body can even pray? Prayer is not a material/physical activity, but an activity of the immaterial, that is, spirit, so it seems to me that prayer is from our human spirit to God, who is of course Spirit.

If it was not the flesh body of Jesus praying to God, then it must have been his spirit, in which case one could assume either a distinct human spirit (which makes the Trinity make a little more sense) or if you maintain that the spirit in Christ *is* God, then you are back to God praying to himself, which after all, only seems equally as ridiculous or not ridiculous as two co-equal Godhead "persons" praying to each other.

Perhaps God praying to himself is only as ridiculous as God speaking to himself when he said, "Let us make man in our own image." But perhaps this is only as ridiculous as realizing that a strict interpretation of the Trinity would, as you say, imply Son, co-equal person in Godhead, praying to Father. Praying to self and praying to someone who is "co-equal" are equally odd, are they not?

I think the apparent absurdities you can draw from either a strict Oneness or a strict Trinitarian view just in this garden of Gethsemane prayer scene are just indications that both are running up against the problem of boxing in Infinite God Spirit. I think that erring on the side of emphasizing the oneness is a less problematic error, but trying to describe the oneness gets problematic due to the eternal, infinite nature of Oneness.

Most importantly, I think, I know I can take either (or neither) view of the Godhead, and see the truth in what the blog entry was actually about, and that is that if our bodies were given to us to be temples of Holy Spirit, then we should certainly respect them as such. What higher purpose is there than being a vessel for Holy Spirit?